


Haunting

by AirgiodSLV



Category: The Lord of the Rings RPF
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2006-02-21
Updated: 2006-02-21
Packaged: 2019-07-20 11:35:16
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,790
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16136411
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AirgiodSLV/pseuds/AirgiodSLV
Summary: Viggo grimaced. Exile indeed. To a twenty-something bachelor at the height of society, a three-day hunting trip with an old fossil like Viggo must seem like the dullest holiday imaginable.





	Haunting

**Author's Note:**

> For [](https://ios-pillow-book.livejournal.com/profile)[ios_pillow_book](https://ios-pillow-book.livejournal.com/), for the [](https://slashyvalentine.livejournal.com/profile)[slashyvalentine](https://slashyvalentine.livejournal.com/) challenge. Historical AU. Incredible beta job done by [](https://impasto.livejournal.com/profile)[impasto](https://impasto.livejournal.com/), who helped me to make the second draft ten times better than the first and wouldn't let me give up entirely.

Lord Bloom’s son was young, lanky, and looked as much the spoiled aristocrat as Viggo had feared. He also looked about as pleased as Viggo felt with this arrangement.

“Lord Bloom.”

“Orlando.” The correction was immediate, but surprisingly resigned. The boy came down the final few stairs to meet Viggo in the foyer, looking him over curiously. “You’re a friend of my father’s, aren’t you? I don’t see any reason to stand on ceremony.” He paused a moment, and then shrugged slightly. “Shall we head into exile, then?”

Viggo grimaced. Exile indeed. To a twenty-something bachelor at the height of society, a three-day hunting trip with an old fossil like Viggo must seem like the dullest holiday imaginable.

“Are you still a soldier? He said I should call you captain.” Orlando tossed regal curls, brow arched expectantly but without haughtiness.

“You can call me Viggo,” Viggo answered mildly. “I don’t have any particular use for that title anymore.”

* * *

_“She’s going down!_

_Viggo physically sagged with relief to hear the cry, seeing the main mast of the Russian ship tumble into the water._

_“Balaklava,” one of the officers said, and spit over the side._

_“That’s the last of them,” Boyd said quietly at his side, and Viggo half-turned, listening without tearing his eyes away from the sight of the sinking ship._

_“For now,” Viggo allowed reluctantly. “There will be more soon enough.”_

* * *

They had made it almost to the heart of the woods, according to Orlando’s directions, but something about the forest felt wrong. “Stop,” Viggo ordered, putting one hand up in warning to cut off Orlando’s protest. He cocked his head and listened, frown pulling deeper as he heard nothing.

“What is it?” Orlando asked. Viggo silently noted his hushed tone, the way he remained still even without knowing why they had stopped.

“There are no birds singing,” he said at last. “No animals.”

“It’s too quiet,” Orlando said after another moment of waiting. Viggo shook his head once for silence.

“How far is it to your father’s hunting lodge?” Viggo murmured finally, and Orlando straightened up.

“Another hour, maybe more,” Orlando said doubtfully. “I don’t know, I haven’t been since last season. But we haven’t passed the witch-tree, and that’s the closest landmark.”

“Let’s keep going, then,” Viggo said, and hitched his pack higher up onto his shoulder. “Arrive before dark.”

* * *

_“They say it’s coming to a head in Tchernaya,” Boyd muttered as he took a seat next to Viggo, rifled-musket in hand. “We’ll be there within the month.”_

_“At least it will be over,” said a new recruit, the one with the darting eyes and snubbed nose who talked more than most soldiers. “Then we can go home.”_

_Boyd made a disgusted noise and dismantled his Enfield for cleaning. “They’ve been saying that for almost a year,” he replied bitterly, and Viggo nodded silent agreement, lips set in a thin line. “I’ll believe it when they sign my release papers.”_

* * *

“This is it,” Orlando said abruptly. Viggo saw it a moment later, the clearing and the sturdy square lodge, just large enough to shelter three or four men on a hunt. He inspected their surroundings, the collection of firewood neatly stacked, and frowned.

“Have the trees here been dead for long?” he asked, pointing to the bare twisted branches, a net of sticks and twigs encircling the lodge.

Now Orlando was frowning too, although it was less easy to see in the deepening twilight. “The last time I was here they were all alive,” he said. “At least I think so. Yes, they were, I climbed that one…” He pointed, and Viggo’s eyes traveled briefly over the forks of low-hanging branches. “And it was covered in leaves. It should be now, it’s not late enough yet in the season…”

“It’s cold,” Viggo commented, still scanning the clearing. “Colder than it was at your estate. Perhaps the leaves have fallen early.”

There were none on the ground, but stranger things had happened in woods. Viggo ignored the damp chill across the back of his neck. “Let’s get inside and get a fire going,” he told Orlando, who was starting to look pale and worried. “There’s nothing out here but the dark, and that can’t hurt us.”

For once, Orlando didn’t say anything in response.

* * *

_“What are you doing after the war?” the recruit – Monaghan was his name – asked. He shifted in his seat, like he couldn’t keep still, and his hands wound around each other. Nervous._

_“I have some money saved,” Viggo allowed, and Boyd grinned in the near-dark of twilight, all pointed teeth._

_“He’s going to write poems,” Boyd goaded, and Viggo shook his head, smiled faintly because Boyd himself was a closet romantic, and also a good friend._

_“There’s a new movement,” Viggo explained, unable to help himself. There was always the chance of another convert, a new soul-mate. “They believe in the artist as a visionary, preparing the world for change and the modern era.”_

_Boyd’s eyebrows raised pointedly. “The new era. That would be the one where they give us rifles we can’t use, because they’re supposed to shoot better.” Someone further down the cabin snorted._

_“They defy convention, and learn by studying each other’s art forms; the artist learns to write, the poet to paint,” Viggo continued, undeterred. “They are great men, doing great things.”_

_“They’re dreamers,” Boyd countered. “And so are you.”_

* * *

“I saw something,” Orlando said suddenly, and Viggo turned, gaze sharpening where Orlando’s was fixed, on the single glass-paned square window facing out into the woods.

“What?” Viggo asked, but Orlando was already moving, peering out into the darkness.

“I don’t know, I thought it was…” He moved again, opening the heavy door and looking out, as if they could see anything, blinded by the light of the fire inside.

“What did you see?” Viggo repeated, disturbed in spite of himself.

“I thought it was a girl, but that can’t be…” He trailed off, then jerked upright suddenly and pointed into the darkness. “There!”

Viggo squinted but couldn’t see anything where Orlando was pointing, just the glooming shadows of tree trunks and nightfall. “Wait,” he ordered, turning his back to cover the fire so that they could see. Orlando was filling the doorframe, trembling with excitement when Viggo stepped behind him to look out.

“Where?” he asked, but Orlando shook his head. His body twitched like a puppet’s, vibrating strings of tension just waiting to snap. Then his hand shot out, and Viggo had no problem following him when he stated clearly, “There!”

A glimpse. A shape, misty but present, a form shrouded in shadows. The silence of the forest pressed in on them again, and Viggo muttered a ward against evil as he pulled Orlando back from the door.

“It’s a deer,” he said firmly, when Orlando struggled against him. “A white deer.”

“It’s a girl,” Orlando argued, but when neither of them caught sight of the shape again, he allowed himself to be pulled back inside. “I saw her.”

“There’s no one out there,” Viggo said roughly. “What you saw was an animal, nothing more.”

“I saw her,” Orlando repeated, but he let Viggo guide him to their bedding, sitting as if in a daze.

Viggo said a prayer for good measure, re-stoking the fire before he went to sleep.

* * *

_“She’s Russian!” the helmsman called, and the deck erupted into action, the Royal Marines forming a line with muskets at the ready while the gunners loaded the cannons below._

_“Another one, so far out from the fleet?” Lieutenant Urban muttered, but there was no hesitation in the way he cocked his Enfield and aimed. Viggo kept his eyes on the target, waiting for her to get close enough that they could be of some use, silently holding his breath for the boom of cannon-fire._

_“I don’t see…” Boyd began, but his words were lost in the thunder of the first shot, and a splash in the water as the Russian ship reeled._

* * *

Hunting was poor. They traveled some distance from the lodge, returning for lunch before setting out again, and they found nothing alive, not even a squirrel or a hare.

“Perhaps there’s a larger predator out here,” Orlando suggested when they returned tired and hungry to the lodge, as the sunset was painting the naked tree branches with shades of light. “A wolf, or a hunting cat.”

“Perhaps,” Viggo ceded. He considered returning early to the Bloom estate. Three days of playing the boy’s keeper would be stretching the limits of his tolerance, and Orlando had no interest in hunting. His curiosity was fixed on the shape he’d seen last night, and the stillness of the woods. Young men had no caution, only reckless courage. Viggo remembered himself being like that, once.

“We can go south tomorrow,” Orlando continued, stepping over a log as the clearing came into sight, the lodge sitting dark and still. “There’s a brook that runs out into the farmland; we could follow it.”

Viggo was about to reply when he heard a snap: the dry, abrupt crack of wood underfoot. He turned and felt Orlando move as he did, a surge forward that ended after only a step, balanced on one foot and staring.

It was a girl. But a girl in white, a girl made of white, one whose feet didn’t appear to touch the ground. Water collected at the hem of her dress, dripping with slow certainty onto the grass beneath her. She watched them silently as they stared at her, and then one of them moved, or breathed, and suddenly the spell was broken. She vanished into the forest behind her, and Orlando made a sound like a sigh, a lover’s cry of frustration.

“Rusalka,” Viggo muttered, a word he’d almost forgotten after so many years. Orlando’s gaze shifted slowly, eyes dazed.

“What?” he asked, but Viggo was already pushing him forward, steering them both towards the safety of the squat little lodge, with its four solid walls and a door that could be locked from the inside.

“Rusalka,” Viggo said again quietly, mulling over the word in his mouth. “I wonder what has brought you here.”

* * *

_“Life boats! In the water, portside!”_

_Viggo cocked his gun and waited, along with his company, for the bobbing specks of colour to solidify into targets._

_“Fire!” their captain ordered, and the first volley went off smoothly, a dozen shots in near-unison. “Re-load!”_

_Viggo raised his gun, aimed again and waited for the command. There was a quick-paced flurry of conversation, and then the command: “Hold your fire!”_

_Viggo frowned, and saw Boyd do the same at his side, head cocked. “Hush,” he ordered sharply, cutting off the men’s muttering._

_Then they finally heard the screaming._

* * *

“You saw her,” Orlando said, and his eyes were fever-bright, intense. “You saw, she was really there. Watching us.”

“She’s not real,” Viggo said harshly, building up the fire until it blazed, almost too warm for the small room. “Don’t think she is.”

“What did you call her?” Orlando asked, gaze unfocused again, distant. “She was beautiful. I want to know her name.”

“Rusalka,” Viggo stated, and it was an ugly sound, foreign on his tongue. “A dead girl, a ghost. A spirit who haunts the woods, and kills what lives there. Evil.”

“She’s not evil,” Orlando protested, and Viggo’s heart sank to hear his voice, the longing tones of a man in love. “She can’t be evil.”

“She is not for you,” Viggo told him, and poked at the fire until it flared bright enough to blind the window. “Don’t think of her.” He was sweating now, the warmth of the fire and his own fear causing him to perspire. He stripped off his frock coat and loosened his cravat until he felt able to breathe again, and less as if there were a hand tightening around his throat.

“Rusalka,” Orlando repeated, far-off and wondering. “What language is it?”

“Russian,” Viggo answered, and made his voice brusque. Orlando cocked his head, not looking at Viggo but clearly listening, sitting cross-legged on his pallet.

“You fought in the war in Crimea,” Orlando stated, and Viggo didn’t bother with a reply. Orlando didn’t seem to notice, continuing in his musings. “What would a Russian ghost be doing here?”

“I don’t know,” Viggo said, sharply enough that it jerked Orlando out of his trance and made him look up.

“My father says that no one talks about the war,” Orlando said artlessly. “No one who was there.”

There was nothing Viggo could say to that, except that it was true. “Get some sleep,” he ordered. “We’re going back in the morning.”

Amazingly, Orlando didn’t argue, just tucked himself beneath the blankets, eyes open and listening, although for what Viggo couldn’t tell.

He stayed awake until Orlando’s eyes finally drooped closed, and then fell into a fitful sleep full of dreams of Russian girls whose faces he could remember, although he’d never known their names, and never would. They called out to him in their native tongue, and he didn’t have the words to answer them.

* * *

_“Women,” Boyd said tiredly, scrubbing dirty hair out of his eyes. “It wasn’t a military ship after all. Decoy, captain thinks, or just bad luck.”_

_“Very bad luck,” Monaghan echoed. He still looked green around the gills, and Viggo could see him sweating._

_“Worse to have them on board,” Boyd spat. “They’re all crowded down in the hold until we can offload them, crying and wailing about their spirits coming back to haunt us.”_

_“They can do that?” Monaghan asked, and Boyd snorted. Viggo chuckled dryly; it was the closest he’d come to a laugh in days, possibly even weeks_

_“Stories. Made up, like the ones about ghost ships glowing green in the night with naught but dead sailors on board.” Monaghan crossed himself, and Boyd laughed, his white teeth gleaming. “Spirits of drowned girls, killed by men. There’s no such thing”_

_“The only thing that will haunt us will be memories,” Viggo said quietly, but Monaghan didn’t look convinced._

* * *

Viggo jerked awake in the small hours of the morning; he remained still, uncertain of what had roused him, until he registered the stillness around him, the lack of Orlando’s soft breathing.

He sat up with a curse, echoed when he confirmed that Orlando’s blankets were indeed empty and the fire had died out. Thankfully he didn’t have to look far; the door was still locked tight, and Orlando was illuminated by the moonlight filtering through the window, turning his dark hair silver-white.

“She’s out there,” Orlando whispered, not looking away from the shadows of the trees, palm pressed flat against the pane. “I know she is.”

“Orlando,” Viggo warned, but had no words to follow. Orlando swayed, as if dancing with the moonlight, and Viggo heard another sigh.

“I thought she would come back,” Orlando said longingly, body stretching forward, supple like a sapling. “I want her to come back.”

“Orlando, come away from there,” Viggo commanded, but Orlando didn’t move until Viggo put his hands on the boy’s shoulders, turning him around, and only then did Viggo see the fire in his eyes, the dizzied hunger.

“Orlando,” Viggo whispered sadly, and Orlando’s body swayed forward again into his, but with more urgency now that he was faced with something real, and not a phantom light in the darkness.

“I want her to come back,” Orlando repeated, and Viggo stopped his mouth in the only way he could think to do it, with his own chapped lips and his hands cradling Orlando’s head, framing his face.

“Don’t think of her,” Viggo ordered, and told himself that this he could do, if it was needed. Orlando surged against him like a brief wind, tangling them both and kissing him passionately, his hands tugging with silent desperation at Viggo’s shirt.

They fell onto the blankets with a complete lack of grace, and Viggo let Orlando have control in his need, laid back against the blankets while Orlando kissed and touched and ground against his leg, keening and begging without words until Viggo removed their clothes enough to give Orlando what he needed, heat and depth and friction, and Orlando thrust mindlessly until he collapsed in replete exhaustion on top of Viggo. Viggo folded his arms around Orlando’s shoulders and held him until he was still.

Orlando slept deeply this time, and never moved from Viggo’s embrace until the sunlight woke them both late in the day, absent of birdsong. Viggo told himself again that he could give this if it was needed, and kissed Orlando once while he was still sleeping, expression peacefully smooth.

* * *

_“Man overboard!”_

_They had a rowboat lowered, and Viggo took up the oars, following the quick chant of orders from the front._

_“Jesus,” someone said, when their boat had bumped gently into the floating body and they had heaved it on board. Hats came off in a horrified rush, and they laid the body – a girl, in a white dress, very young – out along the bottom of the boat._

_“Russian,” the ensign told them, remarkably calm for someone so young. “From the boat we hit, no doubt, and long dead.”_

_Viggo closed his eyes and picked up the oars._

* * *

Orlando was no help in packing. Viggo became frustrated with his lack of momentum and snapped at him, finally earning the boy’s attention.

“I don’t want to go,” Orlando said calmly, startling Viggo into dropping his sack. “I want to stay here. I want to see her again.”

Viggo was silent only for as long as it took him to find words. “We’re not staying here,” he stated flatly. He dragged Orlando away from the open doorway by his arm and pushed him none-too-gently towards the pile of rumpled clothing and bedding. “Pack your things; if we don’t leave soon we’ll be caught in the dark.”

“I’m not going,” Orlando said again, and Viggo ground his teeth.

“That’s what she wants, not what you want. She wants you, and she’ll use you, just like she has every other living thing in these woods, and then I won’t be able to save you. No one will.”

Orlando drifted away again, towards the window. “She doesn’t want me,” he said distantly, and then his gaze focused, expression a discontented frown. “She wants you.”

Viggo’s breath caught. “You hear her?” he asked, and then shook himself, fighting off the tug that was beginning to feel both familiar and stronger, the whisper at the edge of his attention that begged for him to listen. “No matter. We’re leaving, Orlando. Now.”

“She doesn’t want that,” Orlando protested, as Viggo shoved an armful of clothing into his hands and kicked the ashes into the fireplace. “She doesn’t want us to go.”

They had made it to the open doorway when the sky opened above them and it started pouring down rain. Viggo stared in disbelief at the torrent, the grey clouds above where previously there had been none.

“She doesn’t want us to leave,” Orlando said behind him, eerily calm and quiet. His voice made Viggo shiver, and he turned away to shut and bolt the door.

“We’re leaving,” he repeated, and then relented. “In the morning.”

Orlando smiled, distant again. “It won’t matter,” he said lightly. “She won’t let us.”

* * *

_“They say it will all end at Tchernaya,” Monaghan babbled, repeating himself as if saying the words could make them real. “A few weeks, the final battle, it will all be over.”_

_“They say,” Boyd sneered, but he sounded weary, like all of them did. The war would soon come to an end one way or another, for most them. They were growing too tired to fight, too sick of war._

_“It will all be over,” Monaghan repeated desperately, glittering eyes locked on Viggo’s for confirmation._

_Viggo shook his head sadly, thinking of dead girls and the whispering he heard in his dreams. “It will never be over.”_

* * *

Viggo tried to distract them both that night with poetry; fragments of things learned by heart and remembered even after years of forcibly forgetting, the inspirations for his own long-abandoned work; the best the English language had to offer. When he ran out of verses, he started making them up, hoping to hold Orlando’s attention with something of beauty.

But Orlando’s eyes twitched towards the door, and he started at every sound, until Viggo gave up and knelt in front of him.

“Come back to me,” he said gravely, and Orlando stared as if he didn’t understand. Viggo kissed him again, fighting a feeling of panic as he did, and eventually Orlando’s body warmed beneath his hands, his lips responding as ardently as they had last night in the darkness.

Viggo let Orlando push him back, and then the whispering in his mind began, louder this time, clear enough to form words.

 _Let me take you_ , the whispering said, curling around his mind like spider-silk. _Let me possess you, and I will have him and be satisfied. You cannot hold him, he is mine. Mine, mine, mine._

Orlando’s body felt thinner beneath his hands, as if he were fading into mist before Viggo’s eyes in the space of a day. “No,” he said out loud, to stop the whispering. He bit instead of kissing, so that Orlando moaned and writhed and yielded when Viggo rolled on top of him, pressing him down into the tangle of their unmade bedding.

It was still a temptation, and the whispering told him that it could be done, that she would use him just this once, and their coupling would be enough for her, she would let them go. Viggo didn’t believe her, but it was hard to disbelieve what came from inside his own head, like itching, creeping madness.

“Take me,” Orlando begged, arching into Viggo’s touches. “Please, I want you, I want…”

 _Let me in_ , came the whisper, and Viggo pushed Orlando’s legs apart, thrust hard into him until Orlando cried out and threw his head back against the dirty floorboards.

“Mine,” Viggo muttered fiercely, rejoicing in the way Orlando’s throat stretched, his limbs clenched in uncontrolled spasms. “Mine, mine.”

When he came, he took Orlando with him, and then they lay together breathing heavily until the boy’s eyes opened and fixed on Viggo’s, and Viggo saw with a shock that stopped his heart that they were palest blue.

“Mine,” Orlando crooned back at him, in a high voice that Viggo had not heard except in his dreams, and Viggo’s heart pounded as Orlando wound around him like a serpent with a girl-sweet smile.

“It’s over,” Orlando’s lips said, and pressed against Viggo’s for one final kiss, stealing his breath away.


End file.
